Hench received his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1920 and spent almost his entire career at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. For many years he sought a method of treating the painful and crippling disease of rheumatoid arthritis. Working at the Mayo Clinic, he noticed that during pregnancy and in the presence of jaundice the severe pain of arthritis may decrease and even disappear. This led him to suspect that arthritis is caused by a biochemical disturbance, perhaps one involving glandular hormones, rather than by a bacterial infection. In search of a treatment he and Kendall studied endocrinologic factors in rheumatic diseases. In the mid-1940s Kendall synthesized the steroid hormone cortisone, and in 1948 he and Hench tried the drug on arthritic patients. They showed a remarkable improvement, and cortisone became a key drug in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Cortisone and similar steroids are still useful in treating a number of diseases, but the claims that greeted their early employment were excessive.

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Another major advance in endocrinology came from the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn. In 1949 Philip S. Hench and his colleagues announced that a substance isolated from the cortex of the adrenal gland had a dramatic effect upon rheumatoid arthritis. This was compound E, or cortisone, as it came to be known, which had been isolated by Edward C. Kendall in 1935. Cortisone and its many...

American chemist who, with Philip S. Hench and Tadeus Reichstein, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1950 for research on the structure and biological effects of adrenal cortex hormones.

a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal cortex. Introduced in 1948 for its anti-inflammatory effect in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, it has been largely replaced by related compounds that do not produce certain undesirable side effects.

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(1896-1965). The 1950 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to American physician Philip Showalter Hench and chemists Edward C. Kendall and Tadeus Reichstein. The three men won the award for discoveries concerning hormones of the adrenal cortex, which is the outer part of the adrenal gland. In 1948 Hench and Kendall successfully used an adrenal hormone to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic disease of the joints. That hormone is now known as cortisone.